Why I am a socialist?

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Why

Am a
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By NORMAN THOMA

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WHY I AM A SOCIALIST

By

NORMAN THOMAS

This little pamphlet is neither a confession, a true story, nor
an autobiography. There is no reason why I am a Socialist
which does not apply with equal force to other men and women.
I am a Socialist because I believe that in Socialism, in this day and
generation lies our best, indeed our only hope of plenty, peace and
freedom. Or to put the matter negatively, I am a Socialist because I
believe that in Socialism lies our only escape from a long cycle of
poverty, dictatorship and war.

Even today this statement which, in the light of events since
1914, seems to me obvious will doubtless seem to most of you to
require proof. When I was first asked to write an article under this
title by a college magazine, it was generally felt that for an Amer-
ican, with reasonable luck in respect to health, a job, and an edu-
cation, to be a Socialist was a peculiarity which required special
explanation. For that, you see, was in the gilt and tinsel days of the
'20s, when the first and last commandment for thousands of Amer-
icans was "Don't sell America short," and any man with a spare
five dollars was supposedly able to make a killing on Wall Street.

Those days are gone forever. One of the striking facts about our
present improvement in business conditions (this is written early
in 1936) is the widespread recognition, even by its beneficiaries, that
"recovery" is insecure and impermanent.

Despite the present belief of our Tories that a return to the
Coolidge epoch is possible and would be Paradise for them, not only

430272

is their hope fantastically impossible, but their Paradise was a sorry
place at best. Its frantic gamblers' prosperity carried within it the
seeds of the catastrophic depression which ended it, and while it
lasted it was not far from hell for millions of exploited workers.
At the height of our prosperity in 19,29 we did not produce what
we should have and we distributed what we produced with a cruel
and grotesque lack of fairness or justice. As conservative a study as
that of the Brookings Institution in America s Capacity) to Produce
tells us that a reasonable use of our then capacity to produce would
have given us enough more to raise the annual income of every
family in the United States to the $2,000 level without cutting off
jany at the top. (That also would have been worth doing.) There
(were sixteen million four hundred thousand families with incomes
below that level. A third of our people then needed to be rehoused.
There were then between two and three million unemployed. And
many more million of share croppers and other tenant farmers had
Ian annual income of less than five hundred dollars for each family.
C But instead of going to work to use our productive capacity more
efficiently in order to banish poverty, our system went into a kind
of nose-spin. From an annual earned income of about eighty-three
/ billion dollars we dropped to an earned income of about thirty-eight
billion dollars in 1932. Whatever the degree of our recovery since
then, because of the New Deal or in spite of the New Deal, we
have by no means regained the ground that was lost. The rate of
increase of our production does not equal the rate of increase of our
debt. Re-employment lags far behind the rate of increase in pro-
duction since "recovery" began. There is no reason to expect the
standing army of the unemployed to fall below eight million ; they
must be kept quiet under the most hard-boiled administration by the
old prescription of bread and circuses. Nothing else is in sight ex-
cept a temporary boom of wild inflation with the dreadful after-
math of depression.

Now it is important to observe that the great depression which

began in October, 1929, was not caused by any terrible natural
disaster or by any new war. It was certainly not caused by any
"radical" tinkering with our machinery. God, presumably, was in
His Heaven, the Republicans in Washington, and the banker cap-
tains of capitalism were in full command. There was not even a
New Deal for the conservatives to blame until 1933. For what hap-
pened, it is plain enough that the system itself and the captains and
kings who ruled under it must bear the responsibility.

To my mind this simple statement of fact more than completes
whatever might have been lacking in the proof which the Great War
and the faults of the Coolidge prosperity afforded that the capitalist
system was disintegrating beyond the possibility of a few simple
reforms to set it right. It is easy enough in retrospect to criticize .
the various efforts of Mr. Roosevelt's New Deal in pursuit of
"recovery and reform" from the standpoint of a sound progressiv-
ism theoretically possible under capitalism. Practically I do not
believe that any reform measures within the limitations of the
American political and economic situation, would have been feasible
or successful to a greater degree than the New Deal has been. And
that, even the friendly critic must agree, has brought no sense of,'
permanence or security to masses of Americans who suffer all the*
pangs of poverty in the midst of potential abundance.

What are we to blame for this failure of men to use the natural
resources, the machinery and the power which already are sufficient
for modest abundance for all, for security and abundance rather
than for insecurity and poverty? What indeed can we blame but
the system itself, whether under the forms of the old deal or of the
new? What is the nature of that system? For Mr. Hoover it was,
curiously enough,, a system of "rugged individualism." In order to
justify capitalism he talked as if we lived in the age of the pioneers
although, at the very time he spoke, that age had gone forever. The
characteristic mark of the ownership of the means of production
under Hoover, as under Roosevelt, is irresponsibility. Multitudes

of absentee owners give no thought, no effort, no direction whatso-
ever, to the industries from whence they derive their incomes. A
lucky guess with the investment of a comparatively small sum of
money may make a man a millionaire. When the guess is on the Irish
sweepstakes and the reward is not in the millions Mr. Hoover and
the conservative economists call it gambling; when it is on stocks,
oil wells, or corner lots, they call it investment and its rewards
the profits of rugged individualism. Moreover, this system before
the depression was no longer regulated by competition. It was large-
ly subject to private monopoly. The hundred largest corporations
controlled fifty percent of the business wealth of America and were,
in turn, controlled by less than two thousand directors, most of
whom, our various investigations have discovered, did not direct.

The characteristic mark of our system is that it leaves in the hands
of private owners the land, the natural resources, the great machin-
ery, the power, necessary for our common life. And these private
owners or the managers who act for them, use or fail to use what
they own, solely in accordance with what they think will make for
their own profit. Their profit depends upon relative scarcity. There
would be no rent on land if there was not a limitation on con-
venient lots in the cities and a great difference in fertility and
accessibility in the country. To keep up the price of bananas many
a cargo boat has been partially lightened of its load in New York
or New Orleans harbor. To put up the price of cotton under the
New Deal we were taxed to pay great landowners not to plant
cotton even though the children of the workers had no cotton for
underclothes. This dependence of profit upon relative scarcity was
somewhat obscured during the nineteenth and early twentieth
century by the extraordinary increase in productive capacity and by
the utilization of new lands in America by a rapidly increasing
population. Today's technological improvement only makes more
glaring our incapacity to use it for abundance under the profit
system.

The New Deal did, indeed, impose various regulations and some
reforms on private capitalism. It even increased the amount of gov-
ernment ownership. But it still clung to the principle of production
for profit. To a certain extent it replaced private capitalism by state
capitalism. The distinction between state capitalism and Socialism
must be kept in mind. Government ownership under Socialism is for
the purpose of rewarding workers for their toil and for providing
abundance. Government ownership and government regulation
under capitalism, in the last analysis, are for the purpose of stabiliz-
ing and perpetuating the profit system and the division of the na-
tional income under which an owning class gets the cream and the
workers get the skimmed milk.

I am a Socialist because reflection on these facts makes it so
plain to me that it is idle to talk about using our machinery for
abundance or of planning for abundance under the profit system.
The whole theory of the profit system was that it worked auto-
matically; it made planning unnecessary. True enough, it is an
impossible task to plan successfully for the social use of what
individuals own. It is plain nonsense to say that we don't have to
plan for abundance. How can we expect to have anything but
scarcity and insecurity if, in this age of specialization and great
machinery, there is no plan by cooperative effort to see that we get
what we need, and what can be produced ?

The case for Socialism arises logically and reasonably out of our
examination of the development of capitalism and its present failure
to use the machinery of abundance for the conquest of poverty. So-
cialism says: "Let us go about the business of making machinery pro-
vide abundance directly. Let us begin by asking, not what price
will bring profit to private owners, but how much food, clothing
and shelter do we need for the good life for men. Then let us pro-
duce for the use of men, women, and children, in order to supply
them with abundance."

Clearly this requires social ownership of the principal means of

production and distribution. This not in order to abolish all private
property but to give to the exploited workers, for the first time in
the long history of mankind, the good things of life which labor of
hand and brain, applied to the power-driven machine, can produce.
We may make mistakes in social planning, but we can learn by our
experience — without planning our whole economic system becomes
one tragic mistake. Abundance is possible when we can set our en-
gineers and technicians to planning for society, instead of planning,
in so far as they can plan at all, for the profits of an owning class.

This Socialist proposal seems to me wholly reasonable. It is not,
of course, self -executing. It is not a patent medicine which will
work while we sleep. Like every other good thing the achievement
of Socialism will be the result of struggle, and the successful ap-
plication of Socialism requires intelligence and the capacity for co-
operative effort. The collapse of capitalism is inevitable. But there
is no inevitability about Socialism or shared abundance. We may
have a long stretch of chaos, wars, dictatorships, and regimented
poverty. This can be prevented only by men who will not accept
poverty in the midst of potential abundance, and the eternal ex-
ploitation of workers with hand and brain. Not man but the elec-
trical and other power which drives machinery must be the slave of
tomorrow's world.

But this is only part of the reason why I am a Socialist. It is not
merely plenty that we want, but peace. Everybody knows that ma-
chinery which can conquer poverty also makes war incredibly dis-
astrous. Yet war is more appropriate to the strife and hate and ex-
ploitation of our capitalist-nationalist system than is peace. You will
observe that I have added to capitalist the word nationalist as a
more comprehensive description of our disintegrating system. Men
are divided not only into economic classes but into nations. And na-
tions as well as men are divided into the Houses of Have and
Have-not. We live in an interdependent world where not even the
capitalist nations with the most resources, the United States, the

(

British and. French empires, are fully self-sufficient. Yet each nation
claims absolute sovereignty, absolute sway over its citizens, and
blindly sees its economic prosperity, not in cooperation, but in shut-
ting out its neighbors from its own markets. Meanwhile it seeks
aggressively to capture the markets of the world, to obtain sources
of raw materials outside its borders, and a place for its capitalists
!to invest more profitably than at home the surplus wealth they have
acquired by the successful exploitation of the workers who are their
pwn fellow countrymen.

Modern wars arise out of the clash of nations for power and
profit. The heady wine of an emotional patriotism makes men blind
and drunk so that they cannot see that out of this struggle for
power and profit there can be neither true prosperity nor true peace.
Some things indeed we may do now to make our participation in war
less likely. We cannot make peace secure or glorious under the
loyalties of the institutions of capitalist-nationalism. It was my
conviction of this truth which finally made me a Socialist during
the Great War of 1914-1918. It is a conviction which has ever
deepened. The hardest task for Socialism, as recent history shows,
is to bring about a real unity of workers with hand and brain across
the lines of nation, race and creed. Yet it is only in the federation
of cooperative commonwealths, to which, alas, even Socialists have
been more loyal in word than in deed, that there is hope of lasting
peace.

The third reason that I have already suggested for my faith in
Socialism is that I want a world of freedom. This we do not have
and cannot have under the shadow of war and the bondage of
capitalist exploitation. Diogenes, with his lantern, might find an
honest man in our present society, but it would take a strong search-
light to find a free man. Of course in all generations there is a
sense in which freedom is something which must be won. It is also,
if it is to be real, something which must be shared. None of us is
free in a country where Tom Mooney and Warren K. Billings are

still in jail ; where a Governor like McNutt of Indiana can arbi-
trarily proclaim military law superseding the ordinary civil law for
purposes of keeping labor in order ; where the hideous floggings of
Florida and the terror of night riding in Arkansas and Alabama
are used to keep workers in subjection. All workers live more or
less in fear of those who control their jobs or the tools without which
they have no jobs. There is, for a great many of us, a kind of haunt-
ing fear of a jobless tomorrow or an unwanted and unrecompensed
old age. These things can be ended. They can be ended with the
end of exploitation which a proper control of a machine age makes
possible. They can be ended by a society of comrades. The Tree of
Freedom today has feeble roots for itself except as it may grow in
the soil of shared abundance.

But it is just at this point that Socialism is most often chal-
lenged. It is asserted that Socialism is an end to freedom, not the
beginning of a larger liberty. Those who make that assertion very
often are people like the members of the present Liberty League in
America to whom freedom means only the right to grab all you can
and keep all you have grabbed. This is not true freedom at all. The
freedom we seek is the freedom which guarantees to the individual,
justice even from those who do not wish to be just to him; which
assures to him to the right "to know, to utter, and to argue freely
according to conscience" — in short that noble company of rights:
free speech, free press, free assemblage, free association, for which
man has so long struggled. It is true enough that under the circum-
stances of a machine age which make some collectivism imperative
we cannot have the freedom of Daniel Boone or one of the pioneers
whose ideal was to live so far from his neighbors that he could not
hear his neighbor's hound dog bark. The price of our freedom is
freedom in fellowship or in cooperation. Moreover it is true that
there is a discipline which the struggle against tyranny requires
which may sometimes compel a subordination of individual "rights"
in the essential struggle to change the system.

10

Nevertheless I am a Socialist and not a Communist largely be-
cause I believe that even in a transition period we must maintain civil
and religious liberty for the individual. Very great things have been
accomplished in Russia. The most disquieting fact about Russia
is that there is so little sign that the dictatorship is withering away.
That dictatorship still imposes a rigid regimentation and at times
prostitutes justice to terrorism. When Kirov was assassinated by a
former Communist it was a terrible crime. But when the Russian
government thereupon put to death more than a hundred persons
on its blacklist and increased the bitterness of imprisonment or
surveillance for unknown hundreds it was a greater crime. It was a
crime not excused by the exigencies of a revolutionary crisis. It was
a crime directly derived from the Communist theory that justice
is to be understood only in terms of the safety of that abstraction,
the "working masses," which safety is infallibly interpreted by the
dictatorship of the one party in power. In this sort of justice lies
neither security nor liberty for the new society. They are to be
found only in realizing true democracy. This must be more than
nose counting if it is to have power or value. Those who really
desire to maintain democracy will prove it by their understanding
of civil liberty. This fact organized Socialism has accepted to a
degree that Communism has not. Loyalty to the idea of justice and
civil liberty for the individual may sometimes prove difficult in
the hour of struggle. It is the only loyalty which can prevent the
gradual degeneration of men under the new society to the level
of a community of more or less well fed and well tended cows.

S I am a Socialist, then, because I believe in freedom, peace, and
plenty and know that they cannot be realized in my generation,
or my children's or for many which may follow hereafter, unless
they are realized promptly in a cooperative commonwealth or
rather in a Federation of Cooperative Commonwealths which will
embrace the world.

But, I am often asked — indeed, I sometimes ask myself — is this

11

great goal of the Federation of Cooperative Commonwealths prac-
ticable? This little pamphlet is not the place to give a full or ade-
quate answer. It is not even my business in this personal statement
to recite a carefully thought-out platform for American Socialism.
Negatively let me point out that if Socialism is not practicable then
there is no hope for us. Certainly there is no hope in a disintegrat-
ing capitalism, with the practical certainty of a new cycle of wars
and tyranny. Positively, let me point out that the goal of abundance
in a society of free men who harness for life rather than death the
machinery which can produce abundance is so desirable that it
ought to compel men to move heaven and earth to make it prac-
ticable.

But there are reasons other than these for believing in the prac-
ticability of Socialism. There has been encouraging progress made
in the cooperation of men in the management of their own affairs.
I ask you to consider with me the history of labor unionism. It is
a magnificent record of the onward march of exploited workers. I
ask you to consider what consumers' cooperatives have accomplish-
ed. They have shown the capacity of plain men and women to
manage in voluntary association the distribution of goods on an-
other principle than the principle of private profit. I ask you to
examine the success of a great deal of public ownership — roads,
schools, waterworks, etc. — even under the handicap of capitalist
institutions and the profit system. The record is far better than a
press belonging to big business would lead you to believe. Finally, I
ask you to ponder with me the record that Socialists have made. It
is not a perfect record. They have made mistakes. They have met
defeat. But even in our own country the best governed city over
the longest period of time is Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the lead-
er in that good government is the Socialist Party which has kept
Mayor Hoan continuously in office for almost twenty years. Then
look at the enormous progress already made toward socialism under
the Communist Party in Russia. That progress has been made out

12

library

University of Tt
still, Te;

of the pit of Czarist tyranny, war, revolution and attempted counter-
revolution. Consider also the substantial progress, without domestic
or foreign war, in the Scandinavian countries toward a new society
under the political initiative of Socialist parties. I am a Socialist be-
cause examination of these achievements convinces me that Social-
ism is practicable.

Furthermore, reflection on all these things and upon the logic of
the system persuades me that we need not look forward in America
to a Socialism frustrated and corrupted by the lordship of an al-
mighty political state. We can have industrial democracy. Social-
ized railroads and coal mines can be administered under director-
ates representing consumers and producers. Our general strategy in
the holy war against poverty can be laid down by a council of war,
an economic planning council, representative of agriculture as well
as industry.

While we work out this change we can take better, not worse
care of the unemployed, the old and the children. The change to
the new order can take account of immediate demands of workers.
They need not be fed only with the bread of hope in a better to-
morrow. In proportion to the number of workers who awake and
organize for themselves and their children the struggle can be car-
ried on in orderly and peaceful fashion. Separate an owning class
from its dupes and its resistance will be weak. The more peaceful
the revolution the more priceless its boon. This does not imply pas-
sivism or faith in romantic parliamentarianism. The Socialism in
which I believe must have the courage to stand out against tyrants
and their dupes in face of war and fascism. We dare not stop
with merely asking vested privilege and an owning class to grant
us as a concession what is ours by right.

In this struggle the appeal is big enough for mankind. There is
no man in the world who would not be better off with the menace
of war and poverty and insecurity banished. There are few men in
the world who would not, as individuals, be better off economically

13

430272

under the abundance of planned production for use. The appeal
which moves me is an appeal to men and women of goodwill to
bring in this Socialist society. But the very nature of our predatory
society makes the appeal of Socialism strongest to workers. The term
includes all who do the necessary, honorable and useful tasks of
the world, who create its material or cultural wealth. We shall
never have a true cooperative commonwealth until men think of
their reward as workers who create all wealth and not any longer
of their reward as owners of property which enables them to exploit
other men's labor. That is one of the reasons why our great Socialist
appeal must be always to the workers with hand and brain, in city
and country. It is they who have so long been exploited. It is they
who can and must be free.

It is on this note of hope that I end this statement of my reasons
for being a Socialist. It is not a hope which "creates of its own
wreck the thing it contemplates." It is not a private and personal
hope. It is a hope that must be shared, that must be expressed in
organization of labor unions, farmers' unions, consumers' coopera-
tives, a political party of farmers and workers. It is only by such
organization, inspired by Socialist principles, that we can fulfill the
dreams and hopes of the prophets, the patriots, and the saints down
through the ages. Ours is a great responsibility. To us has been
given the mechanical power to conquer poverty and release men
from immemorial bondage. Let us harness that power for life,
not death.

U

Publications of the League for Industrial Democracy

NORMAN THOMAS

Why I Am A Socialist (L.I.D.) $ .05

The Plight of the Sharecropper (LJ.D.r 10

War As A Socialist Sees It (L.I.D.) 05

HARRY W. LAIDLER

How America Lives (L.I.D.) 15

America in the Depression, Supplement to How America Lives 10

Incentives Under Capitalism and Socialism (L.I.D.) 15

Public Ownership Here and Abroad (L.I.D.) .13

Unemployment and Its Remedies (L.I.D.) ,25

Socialist Planning and a Socialist Program — Edited by Dr. Laidler .35
Putting the Constitution to Work (L.I.D.) 15

STUART CHASE

Waste and the Machine Age (L.I.D.) 15

Poor Old Competition (L.I.D.) 10

JOHN DEWEY

Education and a New Social Order (L.I.D.) 05

HAROLD J. LASKI— Karl Marx (L.I.D.) 25

Fascism, A Diagnosis of the Causes of Fascism 10

MAURICE GOLDBLOOM, JOHN HERLING, JOEL SEIDMAN and

ELIZABETH YARD— Strikes Under the New Deal (L.I.D.) 15

HOWARD KESTER— Revolt Among the Sharecroppers 50

JOSEPH P. LASH— Campus Strikes Against War (L.I.D.) 10

JOHN BAUER— America's Struggle for Electric Power (L.I.D.) 10

HELEN ALFRED— Municipal Housing 10

Looking Forward, Discussion Outlines, 1934, 1935, 1986 10

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Wisdom, Justice and Moderation — The Case of Angelo Herndnn

$1.50 per 100 or 02

Tampa — Tar and Terror — $1.50 per 100 or 02

The Scottsboro Case — The Scottsboro Defense Committee 05

The Truth About the Waterfront — International Longshoremen's Ass'n .65

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BOOKS

NORMAN THOMAS

War— No Profit, No Glory, No Need (Stokes, 1985) 1.50

Human Exploitations (Stokes) 2.75

The Choice Before Us (Macmillan, 1934) 2.50

As I See It (Macmillan) 2.00

America's Way Out (Macmillan) 2.50

HARRY W. LAIDLER

A Program for Modern America (Crowell, 1936) 2.50

Socializing our Democracy (Harpers, 1935) 8.00

Concentration of Control in American Industry (Crowell) 8.75

The Road Ahead (Crowell) 1.00

History of Socialist Thought (Crowell) 8.50

A Program for Modern America (Crowell) 2.50

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